Founder of Startup Weekend and Startup Enthusiast Based in Boulder, Colorado

Going Without a Laptop

I get a lot of repeat questions on my travels, and I’ve decided to blog about them when I get a bit sick of answering them (although I really do like all of them).

Todays question: Screw the travel, how are you doing sans laptop?

Answer: very well with the ipad. Thanks to a few key things.

Here is my setup:

First off: no job or any information that just has to be dealt with right away (data that I can’t do vi iphone at least). What I do on it is a) catch up on news / friends b) blog c) download pictures from my camera and d) post the pictures to flickr and Facebook.

So for a) I use flipboard, the twitter app and safari. The blogging is done via posterous and the wordpress app when I am feeling brave (it crashes a lot). For c I use a connector sold by apple, and they download super fast. I edit through a few apps and publish them through posterous (emailing [email protected]) after copying and pasting the photos.

I’m able to use a bluetooth keyboard (as I am now) for writing longer posts. This is great, but makes me look very odd with a keyboard and iPad in my bag or not right where the screen usually is.

So what makes me hate it? Well, no multitasking. I can’t add a photo to this post without publishing first and going back into it.

The bluetooth keyboard gets turned on in the bag, so I have to take out the batteries after every use.

Google docs, checkout and other properties don’t work. You get directed to a mobile site, and you can’t do anything but view.

I got rid of my computer that it is synced to, so I can’t update it.

I’m used to creating on it, so reading books is hard (oh, I can edit more photos!).

Lack of options with apps, for instance, this isn’t a bulleted list because I can’t figure that out.

So all that said, my ‘laptop’ has a two day battery now, sometimes going a week before I need to charge it. Huge, huge, huge win. If you do the process like apple wants, it goes pretty well. It freezes up a bit and is buggy, but all of that is forgiven, for not being on a laptop exploring sounds a lot better that being on one wasting time.

Not having a laptop makes you realize just how much time you waste.

I’ll shoot a video to document my workflow. This will be funny, because to embed it, I will have to find someone with a real computer to grab the embed code, as the youtube site mobile has no way to get the code.

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About Andrew Hyde

I’m a vagabond and a minimalist that sold everything but 15 things and went on a big trip (79 countries). My most read and respected blog posts are here. This blog has reached millions with writing about minimalism, startups, design, culture and events.